Justin Lee

We're approaching what we hope is the final form for the grizzly config project for v3 and would like to solicit feedback before asarch review next week. Please look over the document and reply with any feedback you might have. The schema is all but done as far we've been able to determine but if anyone finds something missing or out of place, please let us know. We're especially interested in feedback from the glassfish admin team for input as to impact and scope for these changes. You'll notice several slugs and placeholders in the document to expound on the efforts there. Thanks.

There's been a lot said about closures both in favor and against the last couple of years.  The debate has raged on for what feels like an eternity.  But the semi-official announcement at Devoxxx recently that closures won't be making it into java7 seems to have put everyone back on their heels a bit.  I, for one, am relieved at the announcement.  Others are not so thrilled and have gone so far as to declare that Java is dead for their lack.  Personally, every major proposal out there made my eyes bleed.  There were so many gymnastics being proposed to deal with typing and generics and backward compatibility and the like that most of those proposals just made a mangle of the language.  I did see one idea that I like (my thoughts on that here) but there's little chance it'll get any serious traction.

I've used closures in both my fan work and my groovy work and I've enjoyed using them.  But the syntax employed is much simpler than what the main proposals had offered.  As nice as closures are, inner classes have served me well enough so far with very little heartburn.  Until Sun is ready to break with older versions of Java, I'm just not sure how well closures will work the current language and VM constraints.

What I was happiest too see was Mark Reinhold's jigsaw project.  A small, modular, independently updatable runtime would be fantastic.  I know many are upset at the lack of any major language changes being promised in java7 but I'd rather see what we have now work better.  Let's not destroy the language trying to shoehorn in things that just aren't working out.

Most of the Java loving world has probably already upgraded to OS X 10.5 which has an official, Apple sanctioned Java 6 implementation available.  However, some of you might be stuck on 10.4 for whatever reason (as I was until today...) and are desperate for some Java 6 love.  When doing some work just this morning on gfv3, I finally ran into a Java 6 only reference that I couldn't get around.  After some flailing and whining, I was reminded of soylatte (a colleague here at sun has been using it) which is built off the openjdk sources.

I grabbed that 10.4 build and extracted it and gave it a spin.  If you're a *nix-head like myself, configuring your shell to use soylatte is a trivial process.  Despite my best efforts, however, I failed to find a way to configure OS X to use soylatte in general rather than Apple's 1.5 VM.  So I had to resort to running IntelliJ IDEA on 1.5 but I could register soylatte as a platform VM inside IDEA and run my apps using that.  And that seemed to work quite well.  I can verify that gfv3 does indeed run on soylatte and that makes me very happy.  It made me happy for about 30 minutes until the UPS man showed up with my OS X upgrade DVD with which I could upgrade and get a formal release instead.  But it was an interesting exercise and hopefully anyone else stuck on 10.4 can use this hint as well.  It certainly would've made staying on 10.4 for a longer period much more palatable.

As much as I wanted to part of the GlassFish v3 Prelude festivities, I didn't really have anything to contribute. See, I started with Sun on the code freeze day for v3 prelude so I had 0 to do with prelude. :) Anyway, I'm the newest(?) member of the webtier team and will be working a number of different items leading up to the 3.0 spec release as part of the EE 6 release next year. There's always v3 FCS day, I suppose. :)

As for who I am, I'm a long time java user (since '96ish). I've been building web applications for most of that actually starting in the pre-JSP days and most recently using Wicket. I'm very excited to work under the hood for a change especially during this major revision cycle underway. One of my roles here at Sun is, of course, to blog about the work going on with GFv3 and especially our web container work. Full blown blogs might not be as frequent as I sometimes wish, but I have a twitter stream that I'm trying to use for more of the quick notes that aren't really quite blog worthy. (I admit I have low blog-stamina these days). I'll try to post either here or on twitter some of the things I come across as a relative newbie to this code. Perhaps my efforts to get elbow deep in glassfish code might help some of you who have been wondering how and where to get started.

In any case, it's nice to meet. Hopefully I'll see you around...